Wasting Breath in our Idiotarian Age

Ill-advised charity can lead the rational into fruitless efforts at opening the eyes and minds of dutiful leftists, the sort who fancy humankind can dictate climate and that boys are girls and vice versa. Noble exertions as they are, only the crunch of painful reality will banish those illusions

I don’t keep close track of these things but apparently the Boy Scouts in the US are going to admit girls. So far, I haven’t heard that the Girl Scouts, or is it Girl Guides, plan to admit boys. What’s going on? What’s the situation in Australia? I simply don’t know.

Scouts go out on camps and such. How will that work? Presumably scout mistresses will have to accompany scout masters to prevent hanky-panky. Boys being boys will be thinking less of how to start a fire without matches and more of what they can do to impress the girls. I think it is yet one more sign of the Western world slipping inexorably into madness.

I read the other day that the Australian Defence Force had spent more than $1 million on sex-change surgeries (male to female / female to male) over the past four years-or-so and this didn’t include various chemical aids. Imagine what the UK’s and Canada’s armed forces have spent; and Obama’s army before Trump came on the scene. Far more, I suspect.

Now stop, think about it, and imagine what investment the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans are making in changing soldier Bills into Jills and vice versa. A brass razoo, I would think. They’re probably concentrating on how to kill their enemies. Just a guess.

Ireland has apparently minted a postage stamp picturing Che Guevara. What lies behind celebrating a vicious revolutionary Cuban communist? Where’s the connection with the Emerald Isle? You might as well ask why the Catholic Church in Ireland stood by in silence while all of the political class embraced the self-evident absurdity of same-sex marriage with such speed and enthusiasm.

There are no rational answers. Nor is there a remedy. A collective malady is not susceptible to psychological intervention.

Countries lose the plot. Extreme nationalism did it in pre-war Germany. Religious fervour does it in Islamic counties. Utopian mirages can bring on communism. In the West, multiculturalism and its crippling progeny, political correctness and identity politics, may be the culprits. To a large extent only those on the Left have fallen prey. Alas, they are disproportionately represented in politics, in the Christian churches, in the media, in schools and universities. And critical mass has now been reached – hence SSM.

Witness also the so-called Safe Schools program in Australia. This could not have been introduced much earlier than it has been. Extolling the virtues of same-sex attraction and gender fluidity to impressionable schoolchildren would not have passed muster not too many years’ ago. People would have thought it to be an exercise in sheer perversity.

Conservatives still do. I mean, why isn’t it perverse to have a normal lad pretend he’s gay or gender-confused when he should be learning algebra or playing football? You might as well ask why trade union leaders support closing down coal power stations, thus throwing workers onto the scrap heap, in forlorn efforts to cool the planet. There are no answers, if reason is applied.

Bjorn Lomborg had a good article in the Weekend Australian (“Clinging to Paris isn’t really cool” is the headline in the ink-and-paper edition) exposing the idiocy of building wind and solar farms. Matt Ridley is an equivalent voice of sanity among those who accept the global warming hypothesis but point out that current policies are both ruinously expensive and ineffective.

Explain to a moron (sorry to someone on the green-left) that the Little Ice Age was not good, that the warming and greening since has been beneficial and that more warming and greening would be still more beneficial. Explain that, even if man-made global warming is on course to become a serious problem, it is best tackled in a cost-effective way. Explain that the current way of tackling it is costly and ineffective. Explain that we should come together to develop the best way to tackle it free from preconceived solutions.

Good luck! You might as well talk to a hatter.

Manipulative social engineers with very queer ideas of what the world should look like have taken over the Left. It’s been a collective body snatch. My dad was on the left. He was a trade unionist who voted (British) Labour all his life. I can’t imagine him fitting into this current ship of fools.

Put the ship of state into the hands of fools and it will sink. We are sinking. Luckily a ship is on the horizon. Is it Abbott or Bernardi on the bridge? Yikes! It’s flying a flag with a star and crescent moon. There goes SSM and Safe Schools.

Peter Smith, a frequent Quadrant Online contributor, is the author of Bad Economics

Comments [21]

Tony Abbott’s loyalty, usually a virtue, has an annoying habit of being a flaw in this sort of situation. He’d probably be PM if he’d dealt with Credlin and re-assigned Hockey, but that was never going to happen. He won’t leave, and because the party hacks know that he won’t, they feel safe in ignoring him, preventing him from fixing the party.

We need a Coalition of Conservatives. If the (not so) small parties of the ACM, ON, LDP, FF etc continue to cut ech others throats worse than Turd & Bull will follow. We are not invulnerable to takeover. All it would take is for the huge influx of illegals not to be ‘pulled’ to Oz but to be ‘pushed’ by Pakistan, China, Africa or a strong religion. We do not have the military or the social guts to kill the zombie invaders to stop them.

Cory has absorbed the two parties and poached the cream of two more. As long as he maintains his momentum – the SSM postal vote has been a windfall for him – he should continue to attract support, and so be the central point for conservatives.

You are correct to be worried about takeover. There are multiple computer games that simulate the real world, with players operating in the RW countries, and in those OZ has been absorbed by Indonesia. While only games, that it has happened means that the seed of the idea has been planted in our northern neighbours.

Chris Kenny wrote an article in the Australian today, about Turnbull being in trouble and Abbott shining in the approach to ‘the killing season’. Your sentiments about climate change he’d agree with, though your sentiments about SSM he wouldn’t, which leaves me scratching my head about a handful of writers for the Oz, writers like Jennifer Albrechtsen, who allowed herself to be persuaded to vote ‘Yes’ by her twenty year old daughter (can you believe it?); people like Greg Sheridan, who had been born and brought up a devout Catholic, even attending a seminary in his teens; and, as I said, Chris Kenny, all supposedly conservative yet voting ‘Yes’. Savva and PVO just don’t count at all, as they ought to be writing for Fairfax.
Anyway, Chris had pointed out something others have mentioned before, that temperatures had actually been cooling over the last decade. He also said, and here I disagree with him, that ‘most people now realise that with Australia accounting for only 1.3 per cent of global emissions our efforts can pay no environmental dividend’. Now, anyone who watches the Bolt Report, or Paul Murray Live, or the Outsiders, would nod sagely about the cooling bit and the notion that Australian only accounts for this 1.3% of global emissions bit . . . no problem . . . but for the fact Kenny said ‘most people now realise’ this. Like me, Chris had probably stopped watching the ABC long long ago, and like me probably lumps channels 7, 9 and 10 into the same PC basket case, so he’s unaware what the other side actually thinks.
Unfortunately, I put off watching the Bolt Report for just a bit tonight, just five or ten minutes mind you, and I couldn’t believe my eyes: Channel 7 (I think it was) and they were showing global warming rising unabated through the last decade up to the present. Where the chart came from (i.e. the source) I wouldn’t have a clue and a channel 7 audience wouldn’t think to query that sort of thing anyway. But, to cut a long story short, I thought of Chris Kenny’s comment that ‘most people now realise’ that we are only contributing this tiny 1.3% bit and I thought ‘no they don’t: the MSM feeds them their daily dose of fake news, and its left to a few conservative publications to tell it the way it is, well, on climate change that is, not SSM, because it seems only the majority of readers’ comments to the Australian support the ‘No’ vote, the paper itself pulling in the other direction’. An extended thought I admit.
So, disappointed though I am about Britain post Brexit referendum, and the Holland, France and Germany’s election results, I am heartened by the Austrian results, and I do feel things are beginning to bubble here in Australia, though the brew lacks sufficient body at present.
The bad news is we will have to brace ourselves for wall to wall Labor in all states and at a Federal level, before the Marxist overreach is seen for what it is. An overreach may last for a few years, and will most certainly be appalling, but that may what is needed to wake up the sleeping majority. But when that happens . . .

My husband believes we’ll end up here with an “outsider” like Macron. It definitely won’t be Abbott and it sure won’t be Turnbull. And Shorten’s numbers are nothing to give him comfort. This is the malaise of the democratic world; lack of brand differentiation. This nation has turned away from Conservatism; the pendulum swings. Educated people (from useless degrees) who have no work are articulate enough to derail government and DEMAND that the big state interferes in all our lives. And you CANNOT have a deep state and institutionalized religion co-existing. Look at history. This is where we are now. I’m prepared to say that, just in NZ (where they’ve had an excellent government which balanced the books but wanted more Maori autonomy) the people have shafted them. Same here. And the politics of AGW and PC are doing it. Hide your money away because there WILL be a huge opportunity cost in this for people who’ve been self-reliant and for those who want to build businesses and thrive. Socialism never builds wealth and it’s very typical of the Left to behave this way: IF I CAN’T HAVE IT, NEITHER CAN YOU.

Such is the state of Europe that they can have an ‘insider’ from the financial world, whom the MSM depict as an ‘outsider’. It seems the people bought it for a while, but Macron is already losing popularity, almost in record time, as his clothes spontaneously and publicly fall away. This show pony is not an insider, despite this being the way he marketed himself in the lead up to the French elections. Anyone who clings to the EU , in the way he does, in truth snatches the whole package. Those who support both the EU and globalism cannot be ‘outsiders’.
The way I see it, in this country, the MSM is too pervasive, too institutionalised. Our rusted on Labor supporters tend to rely on the Free to air TV channels rather than read the political articles in the Daily Telegraph, and they certainly don’t read The Australian (would never have heard of Quadrant) so they will take that much longer to ‘crack’. But some things are getting through despite this, hence the growth of One Nation and The Australian Conservatives (though the MSM show a remarkable resistance towards showing any interest in Cory’s developments, meaning he’ll continue to grow under the radar). The polls respond to his party as ‘other’, putting him in the same basket as the ALA and some 2016 party (that may no longer exist). Being overlooked may be a good thing, but the downside is doesn’t attract the free publicity One Nation and Donald Trump did, by the bucket-full.
As you have rightly expressed, the Deep State and institutionalised religion don’t mix very well, but those unemployed ‘educated people’ with their ‘useless degrees’ are part of that 10% minority dominated by GetUp and the Greens. They are young, furiously idealistic, but ultimately part of the stagnation set. Some of your unsupported, distorted narrative comes from this lot. They manage to pluck it out of the air, rather than expend necessary energy on research, or wide reading.
Single word epithets represent screeds of confuse narrative, as they tear down ‘No’ supporter placards, calling a Maronite, Australian-born ‘activist’ a racist (despite being Lebanese) whilst simultaneously telling him to go back where he came from, despite being born here. Telling him to go back where he came from is coincidentally totally at odds with the ‘open borders’ narrative the stupid woman in normal circumstances adheres to. But ‘racist’ and ‘homophobe’ are the screechy single word slogans to replace a slightly more articulate ‘I don’t agree with you’, position (or more accurately ‘you don’t agree with me, and the things you say are extremely hurtful to me’).
Perhaps this is what a post modernist education produces: dull herds of young voters, fed on unrelated bits of information, to which an infinite number of interpretations have been applied , where every hazy argument carries the same weight as every other headless chook sort of pronouncement. Every ‘student’ receives a ‘pass’ for assignments that ought to be hanging from a hook in an outback dunny. There are no longer unequivocal fails any more. All this adds to the exponential decline in genuine debate.

Peter: Useful thoughts, and you have given me an idea. Let the girls into the Boy Scouts and the boys into the Girl Guides. Then we can re-write your organisation statement as: “Boys being boys will be thinking less of how to start a fire without matches and more of how to start a fire in the loins of the girls.” That should make an overnight reduction in the number of gays, queers, transvestite candidates and “don’t knows”. Many problems solved.

You’re missing the point entirely; the unemployed educated have TIME on their hands. This they use, at the taxpayer expense, to foment dissent, shut down mines and everything a smart, sophisticated economy requires. I re-iterate; IF I CAN’T HAVE IT NEITHER CAN YOU.

I suspect many of them are part employed, particularly the cashed-up, Soros funded GetUp crew. Di Natale threatens to stop the bulldozers at the Adani Mine, and I’d put my money on the likelihood they’ll be using GetUp activists (the unemployed educated you refer to) to do the dirty work, not their party members, unless some of them double up.

You show you have a lack of rigour and the self-discipline to arrive at reasoned positions that include commonsense.

With you it is all straight down the line logic.

Fine, but life is not like that, it’s not black and white.

And that Jody typifies the managerial class.

Also it is why you lot cannot be consistent nor intellectual. Both require degree of original independent thought and experience.

That’s why the answers you lot come up with are wide of the mark, include hate of those who have more nuanced views, and make little impact outside of your own blinkered world.

Stand back, listen and watch.

The hardest thing to do if you have wealth is to keep it.

The conclusions you come to are sure to cause the loss of wealth simply because you only see the world through your eyes and don’t recognise the needs of the vast majority of people.

We don’t isolate ourselves and we don’t think money is the answer for everything.

You are starting to behave like our banker in chief. Stupid solutions to self created problems.

He also lacks consistency, intellect, hates both Abbott and Trump, is blinkered, obsesses over money and it’s worth, hasn’t the slighest idea of how to recognise error or change his views, shares both right and left wing tendencies with all the other managers were n the elites.

Now that’s the problem, not differentiation.

As for my missing the point. Well show me where you bought the issue of time up previously.

And Jody it is you who leads with abuse. All I ever do is challenge your views and often ridicule them and occasionally, when you sink into stupidity I’ll turn your abuse back onto you.
If you see that as hateful … then you have a major problem.